A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  “Bullshit!” came the sound, in clear, Frankish tones. To this day I don’t know who said it, whether the cameraman, the soundman, or the girl with the boom. But in a moment, the girl was reading out loud from a copy of Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen,” picking out, phrase by phrase, all of the philosopher’s attacks on Mohammed—“The Madman and his notorious religion!”—on Jesus the Nazarene—“May his bones be ground to dust!”—and suddenly the camera was down, the red light still blinking, as it recorded sidewalk, feet, and ultimately the brownish scum of the Seine, as fists, feet, words flew. I don’t think specific racial insults were hurled—Arab, Jew, Christian—but somehow the crowd on that Parisian bridge heard enough to pick sides, and within seconds, the sirens of the gendarmerie were wailing towards the pitched battle of universalism that my documentary had become.

  Newby and I ran Leftwards, for the uncertain cover of the Eiffel Tower, while poor Braithwaite, who I imagine had hoped that his sophisticated planning and Vietnamese cuisine would lure me into the ambassador’s suite, was stranded on the far side of the battle, fleeing for the Right Bank and the bright lights of the Trocadéro.

  Late at night, over the dry Guadalaljama of Mariposa, camera and clothing were intact. I wheeled across the bridge towards the lights on the far side of the riverless river, stopping in the first pool of the first streetlamp to open my Guide and locate myself on the map of Mariposa. Six minutes later, I was sipping Lágrima Trasañejo in the Santa María and wondering whether a second meal of fried fish would help keep me awake.

  Because her table was hidden by the row of wine casks behind the bartender, I didn’t see the girl at first. It was only as the perspiration cooled from my eyes that I recognized the violin case propped up against a cask, the fingers of her left hand tapping a rhythm on the scroll end, the third movement, possibly, of the Bach Double, although rhythms are more difficult to decode than fingers on strings.

  Perhaps it was the backdrop of the wine casks, perhaps it was the way she sat—straight-backed against the chair, eyes lowered, motionless except for the fingers of the left hand—that made her look both smaller and younger than when I’d spotted her on the bulletproof balcony above the Duty Free Lounge. The dozen or so tables were peopled with a family tree of candles melted into the backs of their ancestors. In the upcast light, the girl’s face glowed with the luminescence of a china doll, a piece of delft pottery. The whole, the wood behind, the girl before, the candle in front, had a clear, precise restorative effect on my mind, as if I knew every pore of the face, every joint of the hand, every long, brown, girlish hair. Yet the mystery of this second meeting, with a girl who looked all of fourteen, bathed the scene in a halo of unease and confusion—an effect tempered somewhat by her attendants, who appeared to be, at a distance, a pair of nondescript local seamstresses and three out of four members of a rock band.

  “The Lost Tribes.” The fourth member blindsided me with his approach from the bar. “Our band, The Lost Tribes.” I said nothing, pretending not to understand the language, generally the safest course when alone in a strange bar in a strange town at two-thirty of a December morning.

  “Maybe you caught our gig tonight at the Plaza de Toros?” I looked at my girl, still thrumming her fingers on the top of her violin case. “We record for Warner Brothers,” he continued. “We’re big, BIG!” he stressed. “We’re the Julio Fucking Iglesias of Clapham Junction!” I must have smiled. He sat down. I stopped smiling.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” I began.

  “You’re Holland,” he said. Statement, not question. I thought of Hook, how many years ago, standing at the kerb while I tried to flee to the safety of Hampstead Heath, stopping me with the same surprise declaration.

  “Don’t worry.” He leaned forward. “Your secret’s safe with me.” I looked at him, not an unattractive rocker, spiked black hair on a rising forehead, wearing, I’d guess, about forty years fairly lightly.

  “I’ve taped everything you’ve done,” he went on, “carry a full set on the bus when we do the States. ‘Cromwell,’ ‘Marlowe,’ ‘The Mighty Mississippi,’ ‘Heterosexual Poets,’ ‘The Samurai of Ethiopia,’ ‘Sosua: Dominican Kibbutz,’ ‘Flamenco: Gypsy Rip-off, Et Cetera, Et Cetera …’ ” He paused. “Do I have to go on?” I looked over to the bartender, trying not to seem too helpless but to give an impression—some impression.

  “Listen,” he continued in a dangerously soothing baritone, “you are much safer talking to me than sitting by yourself, late at night, in a Spanish bar in full view of the front door.” I could see through the glass to the chippie across the street, where a trio of high school types were counting their pesetas.

  “My Angelica’s at school with your ex’s Arielle. What more do you want, my National Health Card?” I looked back at him.

  “I didn’t know Foss had a child.”

  “So much for investigative journalism,” he said. “My name’s Roger.” He held out his hand. I couldn’t very well refuse. I apologized. He smiled, really quite a beguiling smile. I reckon that’s what separates the men from the rock stars.

  “I’m sorry I’ve never heard of your band,” I said.

  “The Lost Tribes?” He laughed. “It’s a new name we’re stretching for this tour. Used to be Roger and the Rogers, but Ivy over there, the guitar player, got tired of being called Roger.”

  “Now, that I’ve heard of!” I said with some pleasure, never very au courant with rock and roll. The one he’d called Ivy had started plucking a rhythm on an acoustic guitar. Across from him, the darkest of the bunch, shorter and mustachioed, in leather boots and corduroys, began singing:

  “Listen to the jingool, the rrrumbool and the rrraw …”

  “I know that,” I said. “Is that yours?”

  “Roy Acuff used to sing it,” Roger answered. “A Yank. All the good ones are. But we’re trying something new with it.”

  “… Heah the mighty rroosh of the enjawn,

  Heah the loneson hobo’s squaw …”

  “Sounds like I’ve always heard it, with a Spanish accent, perhaps.”

  “… on the Wabash Cannonbaw …”

  “That’s Fredo,” Roger said. “Acoustic and electric bass, timbales, guerreros, congas, and all the Orff instruments. We rescued him from a Club Med off the coast of Tunisia just before the tour. Colombian Piano Bar cartel was holding him for ransom.”

  “Thoz Easton Estates are dandee,

  So the peepaw always esay …”

  “We open the show with ‘Wabash Cannonball,’ ” Roger explained. “Move on to ‘She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes,’ Vim’s favourite. He only started playing drums up in Cambridge, whilst writing his doctoral thesis on music therapy and early child development.”

  “Not under Jock Bismuth?”

  “Of course.” Roger grinned. “Vim couldn’t take his eyes off you the whole time you were up at Pembroke. There’s a bit of him in that film you did of Bismuth, ‘Rock ’n’ Rollabye, Baby.’ ” I looked over at Vim. A tall, skinny boy, like many another, shag haircut, pleasant Norman nose. “You know the shot? The shaved mouse on the marble pastry table dancing the Watusi? Vim’s the slack-jawed bloke running the amps.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t recognize him at all,” I said.

  “Oh, but he will you, I’m afraid,” Roger said. “He keeps your pinup above his bunk in the bus.”

  “My pinup?” I must have said it too loud. The whole band turned and looked my way. Only the girl kept her eyes turned down to the table.

  “Oh, my dear, you’ve been documentarized in more ways than you could possibly imagine,” Roger whispered, and raised me gently by the elbow for the inevitable introductions.

  Ivy, the guitar player, was a small-eared King’s College grad, wearing a T-shirt and a padded plaid suit that I had once coveted at John Lewis. Poor Vim was so flummoxed by my arrival that he departed immediately to retrieve more drink, serenaded by Fredo’s Spanish obscenities and a chorus of g
iggles from the two local girls, whom no one attempted to name.

  I was hoping for an introduction to the little violinist, or at least an explanation of what such a young girl was doing in this crowd at so late an hour. But Ivy insisted on an impromptu audition.

  “Roger must have clued you in on the Grand Concept,” Ivy began, retuning his guitar.

  “Ivy,” I tried to say gently but firmly. “I’m afraid I’m not in my best form to judge anything right now.”

  “That’s a Spinoza Portacam, isn’t it?” he carried on without looking up. “Vim can tape me and Roger, and Fredo can beat out the drum part while humming the bass line.” Vim set the glasses on the table and looked down at me with big doey eyes. I could refuse? Any better than I could refuse Conchita at the Teatro La Rábida?

  “Worse comes to worse”—Roger winked—“you can sell the tape to MTV.”

  Ivy hit a loud open-string chord. Fredo upended an overflow bucket off the tap of a Seco Añejo for a conga drum. The bartender’s head shot around the wall of casks. Ivy vamped on, a fast, pounding choo-choo train in some minor, maybe G. Fredo shrieked with pleasure. It was going on towards three in the morning. There were no other customers. The bartender shrugged.

  “The Grand Concept,” Roger announced, as Vim crouched and the red Record light flashed into action. “About thirteen thousand five hundred miles into our last tour, we realized that we Famous Rock Musicians, Roger and the Rogers, knew more about travelling, more about the ins and the outs of the ons and the offs, than we did about musicology, more about Upgrade than Retrograde.” The English sophistication, I thought, trying to freeze a certain look of interest into my jaw. Every English boy over the age of forty-five tries to impersonate Clive James on camera, and every boy younger aims at Jools Holland. I recognized this familiar banter. They all wanted into my knickers. But I was safe. They were British.

  “Accordingly, we transformed Roger and the Rogers into The Lost Tribes, named after those famous sons of Jacob who sometime around 722 b.c. were exiled well over the rainbow, somewhere past the arm of long-distance telephone and American Express traveller’s cheques. We took as our repertoire ‘Charlie and the MTA,’ ‘The Midnight Special,’ ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,’ ‘Route 66,’ ‘Highway 61’—part of our Grand Concept: Travel. Travelling Music. Music About Travel. Music to Travel To. Music About Famous Travellers.

  “And who …” This must have been a prearranged cue, for Vim swivelled to shoot Roger from a position just above my left shoulder. “Who was, who is, the greatest traveller of all time? Called Cartaphilus by Roger of Wendover, Ahasuerus by the seventeenth-century Germans, Juan Grazia al Dei by the Spaniards, Giovanni Buttadeo by the Italians. Damned for shoving the Man with the Cross from his door on the way to Calvary. Condemned for his pains to wander the earth until Judgement Day. Who is he? None other than that long-bearded Frequent Flier, the Wandering Jew!”

  And with that, Ivy modulated into an angry string-breaking mixture of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens—angry, you must understand, in the British sense of the word.

  THE BALLAD OF THE WANDERING JEW

  (as performed by The Lost Tribes at

  the Bar Santa María in Mariposa)

  When I was just a young man,

  And looking for my Soul,

  I travelled to Jerusalem,

  And stood by the Wailing Wall.

  An Arab in kefiyah,

  Called me by my name.

  He didn’t look familiar,

  So I began to walk away.

  He said, “Don’t be unfriendly,

  I won’t keep you for long,

  I know your folks and family,

  I mowed your uncle’s lawn.”

  He described my cousins Sofie,

  Mona, and the twins,

  The curly hair on all their heads,

  And the one on Mona’s chin.

  I smiled and said, “I’m sorry.”

  He said, “Don’t apologize.

  Since I returned I cut my hair,

  Bought contacts for my eyes.

  You see, while I was doin’ spadework,

  For the landscape company,

  I was studyin’ down in New York town

  To get my Ph.D.

  “I was up all night with Conrad,

  In commune with Mr. Kurtz,

  While watching I Love Lucy,

  And digging Ethel Mertz.

  My chief supervisor

  Was a homeboy from big J,

  A brainy Joe for the PLO,

  Speechwriter for Y.A.

  “He talked of Susan Sontag,

  He talked of Derrida,

  Of Sir William Jones, and what kind of stones

  Pave the streets of Ramallah.”

  CHORUS

  Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.

  “I tried to integrate it,

  Thought he’d be proud of me,

  If I incorporated

  His guerrill-philosophy,

  How Hemingway and F. M. Ford

  Taught Conrad how to shoot,

  How it’s one big heart of darkness

  From Gaza to Beirut.

  “Five hundred pages double-spaced,

  Five-oh-one with the epigram:

  A rifle shot from the Rubáiyát,

  Of my man, Omar Khayyám.

  Seven short days later,

  His secretary phoned,

  ‘Seven at The Marlin,’

  And then the dial tone.

  “When I arrived, he was sitting down

  With a shot of Johnnie Black,

  And a ticket-of-leave to Tel Aviv

  With my name writ on the back.

  I asked him if he’d got me,

  A Fulbright Grant or two,

  The tenure track in Haifa,

  A gig at Hebrew U.?

  “I saw he wasn’t smiling,

  So I took another tack,

  I asked him when I would defend

  In the face of the English Fac.

  ‘Defend?’ He laughed, and raised an eye.

  I thought he looked impressed,

  And wondered if he’d sent my script

  To the University Press.

  “He offered me a cigarette

  And advice to go with it:

  ‘You’d best defend your homeland, boy,

  Cause your thesis is for shit.’ ”

  CHORUS

  Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.

  “Ten weeks on the West Bank,

  In training, living rough,

  I finally got my sheepskin,

  And a new Kalashnikov.

  I’m a Graduate in Plastiques,

  I’m a prof of Sturm und Drang,

  I’m a Ph.D. in TNT,

  I’m the Dean of Datsun Bombs.”

  “Just wait a minute, Abdul,

  I don’t want to hear no more,

  I came here as a tourist,

  I don’t countenance no war.

  I don’t know why you trust me,

  Don’t know why you take such pains.”

  “Cause your Uncle T., he trusted me

  With his lawn up in White Plains.”

  CHORUS

  Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.

  I have to admit that they weren’t the awful collegiate string band I’d expected when I first sat down, and it was a tremendous relief to hear real English, even if real English required that “Sturm und Drang” rhyme with “Datsun Bombs.” Ivy and Fredo were, to give them credit, setting up a rather sophisticated polyrhythmic counterpoint behind Roger’s declamation, throwing expectation slightly off balance, a five-cylinder polka, a one-legged reggae, a dance impossible to dance to, impossible to ignore. I had heard them before, I was certain of it. But was it Wembley or the White House? Opening for Kate Bush or George?

  I was on the verge of a recognizable picture when I noticed that the girl was halfway out the door. It was Fredo’s move that pushed me out of the current, the way he cradled the wine bucket
between elbow and thigh, and slid between the girl and the exit. The girl, for her part, was grasping the violin case to her body, her face still bent towards the floor, so her hair hung in a protective curtain around the fiddle. Fredo was talking to her as he drummed, something Spanish, but too low and fast for me to understand. The girl had stiffened, terrified, refusing to move back towards us, incapable of moving forwards.

  I stood. Roger was thrown back in mid-chorus, as were the two local girls draping his shoulders. I moved to the door, taking Fredo by the elbow, and urged him to the public telephone at the far end of the bar.

  “Fredo,” I asked him, “I need to call a friend, but I can’t make heads nor tails of these Spanish telephones. Please,” and I twisted the drum from his arm, “please, talk to the operator for me.”

  “Señora Holland,” he protested, and it took all my strength to maintain seduction against that declaration of my forty-six years. But it worked. When I turned around, the girl was safely gone.

  With Fredo’s help, I tried calling your Mariposa office again, Ben. This time, I followed all your instructions, pushing this button and that, waiting five seconds, speaking slowly, leaving a message to reach me at the Santa María, where I hoped “The Ballad of the Wandering Jew” would last me until daybreak and Hertz, if not the end of Conchita’s airline strike.

  Three steps into the procedure, Fredo deserted me to follow the local girls out the front door. I hung up the phone and retrieved my unused pesetas from the slot above the dial. The waves of Ivy’s guitar swept around the casks to the bar. Without the girl with the violin, my only reason to return to the table was to retrieve Spinoza and Sandor.

  “Señora!” the bartender whispered to me as I walked past. I stopped, looked down. He must have lacked five feet by more than three inches. But he made sure that I waited by the counter for his message while he turned to the spout and drew me a fresh Lágrima Trasañejo. “Señora,” he said, and I bent down to catch his raspy English, “that song they are singing, the boys. They are making a joke out of something we Spaniards take seriously, very seriously.” He walked out from around the narrow wooden trestle and pulled a chair over for me.